Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

October 31, 2011

This is one of those 'why didn't I think of it' resources. Pinterest essentially lets you bookmark and share images that you like. You can create boards or sets of images, annotate them and share them with friends. It looks something like this:

Simply add the 'Pin It' boomark to your browser and then when you come across an image that you like, it's a click to add it to a collection. Now of course, you can do this using traditional bookmarking schemes, but this makes the process much easier and it's much more enjoyable - and easy to see the images that you've got.

I can see a wide range of uses for this - Pinterest suggest boards for books you like, home style and so on. I can think of subject boards, motivational posters, information based images, library related cartoons and so on. I've had an account for less than a day and it's already really busy with people following me back, sharing images and so on. It doesn't take much work, and it's very simple. Worth while trying it out.

Unthink is the latest challenger to Facebook. At least they have their own URL - http://unthink.com/ unlike certain other recent attempts (Diaspora anyone?) which is in their favour. This group are going down the route of 'unthinking social media and Facebook' and becoming extraordinary because they can think for themselves - just like everyone else in the video. Can't tell you anything else about this lot as I don't have access to it yet, but as soon as I do, I'll let you know.

October 25, 2011

I've long been a fan of the SimilarPages browser addon, which allows me to right click on any site and the resource will give me a list of similar sites. It's great when I need alternatives or I get stuck, or just for when I want a bit of variety. I got an email from Pietro Borradori, the CEO who told me that they've now produced their own SimilarPages search engine. I've played around with it, and it's fun. Simply type in a URL of a site that you know, and the engine will find other related sites for you to look at. I tried my own site (obviously!) and I recognised a good 70% of the results that were returned to me, and most of the others look worth exploring. It's not 100% accurate, but nothing ever is. You can also word search and see some results, click on a link and see a second column of results, as well as a preview of the site you were interested in.

Very simple and straightforward, but really useful. If you try it and like it, I'd strongly suggest adding the browser button, which works across most browsers and it is tremendously helpful.

However, if you like the concept, but don't like the engine, try SimilarSiteSearch, or Whoislikeit, or use the Google related: functionality to achieve the same type of effect.

October 21, 2011

I don't know if anyone else has seen this, but it looks as though Google has done away with the '+' symbol in search.

I checked in their search help pages as well and it's confirmed with: "The + operator has been replaced. To search for an exact word or phrase, use double quotation marks." This is disappointing, as the + sign was fairly general across search engines as a way of forcing the engine into using a specific variation of a word or phrase. It also means that it's now necessary to type another character - which is a petty point I know, but they all count. To be honest, I'm not that surprised - what with Google+ and +1 buttons and the like, they'd got themselves into a right pickle with the symbol. It has made it almost impossible to see if this is an entirely new thing, or it's been around for a while, but my feeling is that it's new, as I run +searches quite often. (Having just checked, this seems to be new, less than 24 hours old).

Ever need to know about a particular place or section of land and weren't quite sure how to research it? You may want to take a look at Wikimapia, which is basically Google Earth with socially added overlays, linking to various resources. Simply find your place of interest, zoom in, click on the highlighted area and find out about it. Here's an example:

Mouseover the area that interests and read the dialog box.

You can create an account and add your own information as well. Certainly worth exploring.

There are a number of websites that you can visit for public domain, free to use images. The wonderful people at Pandia wrote a very useful page listing some of them, and I would suggest that you please visit it. I've listed them with my own comments, mainly as an aid for me.

The Burning Well. I ran a search for 'library' and got 6 images back, none of which were particularly useful. The collection is made up of images that have been donated by individual photographers, but there's no indication as to how large it is. However, when you do a search for 'flower' and only get 300 results, it's fairly indicative that it's not going to be huge. It's easy enough to download the images, so this may well be a resource worth trying if you're really getting stuck, just on the offchance.

Everystockphoto says of itself "We are a search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo's license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos. Membership is free and allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos." They provide access to 12,432,842 free photos and my search for 'library' returned 46,000 photographs, from a variety of resources - many from Flickr. The licensing was clear - public domain, attribution and so on. The search interface was good, and searchers can limit by license (8 options), database source, tags, shapes, widths, height and so on.

Flickr. I've talked about Flickr a lot in the past, and am not going to rehash it again now. Suffice to say, visit the Pandia blog entry for a good overview of the available functionality.

Freefoto is made up of 132413 images with 182 sections organized into 3636 categories. 'Library' gave me a disappointing 33 results, which were all the outside of buildings. Search functionality was minimal and worked on a category/directory based approach, though a simple free text search box was available.

Free Images has 6,000 images available, but it's a UK based resource. No library based images, and results were displayed in a directory format, which turned everything into a two click affair, which didn't interest me. They have 78 categories which is probably the best way to search their collection. Terms of use seemed fair - attribution and don't make money.

Karens Whimsy was an interesting find. The site says of itself "On the following pages you will find hundreds of beautiful images gleaned from my collection of old books, magazines, and postcards. They are all from material printed prior to 1923 and are in the public domain." It certainly is a whimsical collection, and one that it would be easy to spend a lot of time hunting through. There's a basic category arrangement, and my feeling is that it's a collection that would suit crafters and hobbists, rather than people who needed images for reports and presentations. No library images, but 6 clipart images of books.

Public Domain Photos. Five thousand images to do what you like with. 1 library image, but looking through the misc. section did show some really nice images that would work well in any professional report. Worth taking a stab at in the hope you'll get lucky.

Wikimedia Commons is another of my must go to sites. I source a lot of images from there - its simple to use, you get good results and a clear indication of what the copyright situation is for any image. There are almost 11.5 million images available, and while it didn't tell me how many 'library' images I retrieved, there were some really good ones in the mix.

If you need more image search engines - covering all images, not just PD ones, I've got a collection of them on my website.

October 13, 2011

a building. Sure, there are some lovely wonderful buildings which house libraries, and we don't have to go back too far to see when the building that housed a library was essentially a temple of worship to the book. However, while a library needs a building (although I'm not going too far down that route any longer, since a case can easily made that it's no longer true), it can't define the library. Sure, it can help with the concept of a library, and it can assist in the role of the library - they used to be quiet buildings with loud rooms, but now they're more often than not a loud building with quiet rooms, but a building full of books, neatly arranged with helpful people doing things for the members/clients/etc could quite easily be a bookshop.

A library is not a collection of books. It's also not a collection of resources either. We cannot define ourselves by the artifacts that we use. We should - hopefully - have long gone beyond that - into other media to begin with, but then, as society has started to leave physical objects behind with the increased use of music files instead of CDs and films on demand instead of DVDs and knowledge 'in the cloud' instead of on CD-ROM, so has the the library and the librarians. We're not in the book business - we have *never* been in the book business. We're in the knowledge business, helping, assisting and facilitating what our members and our communities want. However, and this will raise a few hackles I'm sure - perhaps we've not done it as loudly or as obviously as we should. For many reasons - librarians are not well known for being self publicists and for shouting what they do from the rooftops, and perhaps because in our job we seek consensus and agreement rather than discord and disagreement. If it is seen that the principle role of the library/librarian is to maintain a collection, then we become defined BY that collection. The argument then turns into one of 'what will happen if we get rid of the collection?', rather than 'can our community manage without the input of a librarian?' At that point, people will say that they can manage without, because there are bookshops (although in decreasing numbers), charity shops (God help us) or Amazon or Google, for those lucky enough to have access to the net.

Problems arise when the library/librarians are not seen as part of the backbone of a community. Once this happens, it becomes logical to think of cutting it. The decisions of councils and mayors with little brain are a total puzzlement, when viewed in the light of how we see libraries. They see them as a resource which isn't part of a community. We have an insane situation where a community is apparently forced to choose between having a library and caring for its elderly and deprived. There are a few points worth making here - firstly, it's the role and responsibility of an elected body to run services on behalf of the community that elected them, and it's not for them to try to abrogate responsibility back to the community, either in terms of 'you want it you run it' or in terms of 'if you don't let us do x, y will happen'. The very idea that if we don't close libraries we have to cut social care is patently ridiculous. I would be the first to agree that a council has to prioritise, and things like hospitals, firestations, police are towards the top of the list. However, we don't have hospitals, firestations and police stations on every corner, because at some point other things come into play. In order to have a healthy community we have to have a varied community and that includes a variety of social amenities. A better, more logical discussion might be 'do we want a library space, or do we want a swimming pool', although obviously a better discussion would be along the lines of a rather grander economic discourse on what the Government is or is not doing to the country as a whole.

A second point is that a library service, which is able to provide resources, artifacts and knowledge to a community does fulfill a social need and requirement. Without getting too hysterical about it, while a hospital or a day centre can be used to keep a body going, a library service keeps a mind going. In that respect, a library service is just as important as a health service - because both services are aimed at doing the same thing - keeping a society or a community safe and healthy - they're just dealing with different elements.

So, if a library is not a building, and it's not books or other artifacts, what is it? I've already said that librarians cannot and shouldn't be defined by what we work with (if that was the case we'd all have very dim views of greengrocers who sell vegetables!), but rather by what it is that we achieve. We should be defined by the effect that we have on our society and our communities. Because really, what we do, what we're involved with, is the knowledge business as I've said, and that actually equates to the power business. I often say that I wanted to be a librarian because I wanted the power, and while it's fun to hear an audience laugh, it's also quite sad, because clearly they often don't see it the way that I do. Our role is not found on our shelves, in our computers, in our buildings or even in our history, but in what we DO. And that isn't 'stamp out books'. That's defining us, once again, in terms of the artifacts that we may (or increasing may not) use.

Every single librarian does something special, and it doesn't matter if they're in a school, public library, academic, prison, commercial - any. We help to or perhaps even inspire people to read, we help people get jobs, we change lives. We make a community better. We make a community better, and yes I did repeat that, because it's important. We help protect free speech, we help provide people with hope, and I don't make any excuse for using such hyperbole, because it needs to be heard. It needs to be shouted. A while ago I wrote a piece on 'What Librarians Do and what Google does'. Someone suggested that Google did good things as well, and librarians were also on the lookout for money. That's completely missing the point, because the whole reason for librarians is to work for their members and their communities by facilitation, and by providing good, valuable credible information to better and improve what people do. If Google does this, it's a nice sideline from their goal of making money.

Librarians are here to help their communities, and an attack on a library is an attack on a community. It may not seem like it, and clearly to a lot of councillors it doesn't, but that's exactly what it is. Because it's saying that the benefit that people get from their libraries/librarians in terms of learning to read, in getting a job, in finding social services to protect them in some way, in giving people the opportunity to learn or indeed just enjoying a good book - none of that matters. And when they say that none of that matters what they're actually saying is 'that community doesn't matter' and 'that person isn't important'.

Libraries and librarians are not a community 'bolt on' service. They are an integral part of a community, they help represent a community and they contribute to the health of a community. That's why cuts to libraries are so dangerous - not just because they deprive people of access to resources, or jobs, or information or pleasure, but because they say 'You don't matter. You are not important.' That's not a good thing.

I mentioned Diaspora the other day as a network that was trying to set itself up as a competitor to Facebook. Today I got an email from them starting with "We love you. Yes. Really, we do." That never bodes well, and this time was no exception. They're clearly deeply in financial difficulties as they are asking for donations, with a suggested donation of $25. That's a lifetime membership to LibraryThing if I remember correctly! However, it's been pointed out that the 4 employees are giving themselves $28.8K salaries, which some may consider slightly excessive.

Irrespective of that, once it's out that there are financial troubles, people will run away, not towards. They certainly haven't done themselves any favours.

October 11, 2011

I got asked 'how can I count the number of ReTweets that I get?' There are a number of options available. First of all, Twitter tells you when you've been retweeted by email. Login to Twitter, go to your Settings option (top right), choose Notifications and make sure that the Activity/My tweets are retweeted box is ticked. You'll then get emails that tell you who retweeted you, and to how many people. I'm not however sure if this works with protected accounts - I can see reasons for and against, so if anyone knows, please tell the rest of us via comments.

There are plenty of resources that will help with the whole RT business. You can go to Twitter's advanced search and simply search for RT @username but to be honest, Twitter search is pants at the best of time and I wouldn't suggest that you'll get much out of it.

Tweetreach is an interesting resource - you can put in details such as your name for example, and see how many people you have reached with Tweets. You can see what it looks like below:

While that's great for learning about a person, it's not so useful if you're looking for a specific tweet, since you have to have some way of identifying it. With the Tweet that I wrote which you can just see there, 'Gaming in Libraries' it's not easy to see just how many people have retweeted it. I did limit Tweetreach to a small phrase, but that also picked up references to gaming in libraries that other people had mentioned which had been retweeted. So - limited use.

This does have a paid version however, and you can get more information from it, such as Top Retweets or Influential Retweets.

Klout gives you some basic data on Retweets (as well as a bunch of other stuff) but it does tend to be rather generic - the number of message retweets, number of people who have retweeted your material and so on. You can't follow a single tweet though, to see its reach. Peerindex does something very similar; gives you the chance to compare your scores with other people, and you can see who has RT'd your work. Twitalyzer provides some basic metrics, but again requires a subscription to see the really interesting material. Tweet Grader "is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. Just enter your twitter username (password not needed) and you'll get an instant grade and report. It's easy." Except that I tried it with mine and I broke it.

So - not a great deal really, unless you know differently? I think the best answer is to set up your Twitter account to email you RT's and keep a note of them.